Joint Observance

The ELCA Conference of Bishops' Ecumenical and Inter-Religious Liaison Committee and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs Committee commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation by signing a joint statement during a Lutheran-Catholic service of Common Prayer.

Reformation 500

Martin Luther posted his “Ninety-Five Theses” in Wittenberg on Oct. 31, 1517, and the resulting debate about Christian teaching and practice led to changes that have shaped the course of Western Christianity for almost 500 years.

Luther and Lutheranism

Martin Luther was eight years old when Christopher Columbus set sail from Europe and landed in the Western Hemisphere. Luther was a young monk and priest when Michaelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel in Rome...

ELCA Good Gifts Catalog

Assignment Process

Assignment completes candidacy for all people, including those ordained in another Lutheran church or Christian tradition, moving them toward first call and admittance to the appropriate roster in the ELCA...

[1] At the beginning of the 20th century, the
average life expectancy in the United States was 48 years. One
hundred years later, it is 78. This change came from public
health gains: sanitation, diet, immunization,
antibiotics. Americans did not decide in 1900 to pursue 30
more years on Earth. It just happened, and happily
so. One hundred years later, most of us believe that our
practices affect lifespan and that the sciences and technology of
the 21st century could extend lifespan much further.

[2] Beyond the public health measures that allow Americans
to experience old age, science and technology continue to increase
life expectancy by diminishing the afflictions of aging. Both
of my parents have had major reconstructive surgeries in their late
70s (heart valve and shoulder replacement). Yet, this remedial
life-extension is piecemeal and inconsequential. If the big
killers-diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer-could be
eliminated, the gain would be only 12 years. That makes 90
years, almost doubling 48. And more of us would make 122
years-the known maximum. But we will still be old for decades;
we will not be that well; and some condition we have yet to control
will take us down.

[3] So, what about attacking the source-senescence,
aging? What if we slow or delay aging and increase lifespan to
200 years? Caloric restriction, genetic manipulation,
anti-oxidant therapy, hormone treatment, telomere
manipulation-these are current approaches under
development. Is there a moral difference between these efforts
and current life-extension? Is there reason to draw a line at
90 years? What would be different about 200? We would
need to make a major societal commitment to
age-retardation. Should we?

[4] I select the question of life-extension for three
reasons. First, life-extension is a fruit of the technological
imperative, coupled to an ancient native desire to transcend
death. Why must we die? What next? Life-extension
says-"Death? Not yet!" Temporary transcendence-but we
will take it. Second, life-extension is a key indicator of the
altered nature of human agency in a technological society, so
argues Hans Jonas.[1] For Jonas, with
life-extension we take our own evolution in hand, and for this we
need an ethics of responsibility commensurate with human
powers. Third, the most important American proposal for an
ethics of medical limits written twenty years ago, Daniel
Callahan's Setting Limits, focuses upon life-extension.[2]

[5] I raise the question of life-extension as a question of
social decision. And I want to employ the social thought of
the ELCA. In previous work, I have argued that the ELCA has a
core social ethics that cuts across several social statements.[3] And I have examined the
worldwide development and use of genetically modified crops and
foods through this ethics.[4] I want here to see
whether deciding about limits to human biotechnology can be
illuminated by ELCA ethics. Responsibility, according to
Jonas, requires such integrated thought, and ELCA social thought
embraces a responsibility ethics.

Framing the Question

[6] I begin with some framing. 1) I am restricting the "we"
of our question to ELCA people. Developing a public ethics is
another task-and extremely important. Daniel Callahan, the
President's Council on Bioethics in Beyond Therapy,[5]
Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future,[6] and Bill McKibben's Enough[7] argue
in public on life-extension and other limit issues. These
proposals assume a common ethics of liberal individualism and
authenticity, which admonishes us to do as we please as long we do
not harm others. Callahan, the President's Council, and
Fukuyama focus on social harm. McKibben focuses upon the
threat that advanced biotechnology poses to individual quests for
identity and meaning.

[7] 2) While life-extension has profound implications for
personal well-being, I focus on social ethics because Christian
ethics is social (love the community of life as yourself) and
because personal access to age-retardation will require expert
agency and vast societal resources. Humanity can pursue
life-extension, but only at the expense of other social
goods. So, I am asking whether Christian love requires,
forbids, or allows a social project of age-retardation.

[8] 3) I am assuming that radical life-extension would
become a social norm-not a matter of personal
choice. Proponents of a technological imperative often claim
that technology expands the realm of human choice and so expands
human freedom. Yet, the history of technology is more
mixed. None of us chose to get to Hickory by horse. We
must do e-mail, if we wish to keep our jobs. I assume that
age-retardation technology would not be one choice among
others. It will be embraced as normative, just as modern
sanitation, diet, immunizations, and antibiotics (and now heart
valve and shoulder replacement at age 78) are goods judged to serve
basic human need. If we pursue life-extension through germline
genetic engineering, we will not seek to expand personal choice,
but to better the human condition and to take our own evolution in
hand.

[9] 4) Our question is about obligation to future
generations. What do we owe the future? What does love
require? Do we owe future humans a societal commitment to a
lifespan of 200 years because we probably can? Does believed
ability warrant obligation? Not necessarily. We have
obligations to the future. But as we shall see, ELCA social
thought situates such a commitment within a wider nexus of human
and planetary need. If we judge a human lifespan of 200 years
to be a basic need and can meet this need within certain conditions
along with all others-then we would be talking obligation.

[10] 5) ELCA thought bids us to think about the command to
love the community of life as an obligation to meet the basic needs
of the community and its members. In an age where technology
satisfies native desires that become felt needs and entitlements,
discerning obligation through judgments about human need is
difficult. But debates over biotechnology cannot be
responsible without debate around this issue-which the President's
Council has championed. Appeals to cost, fair access, safety,
and freedom are important norms for governing
biotechnology. But once these norms are met, should we
undertake aggressive life-extension? The Christian social
vision includes these norms and more, because love is thicker than
"do as you please as long as you do not harm."

Responsibility and ELCA Social Thought

[11] It is not obvious that Christians should reject or
embrace radical life-extension. We are all beneficiaries of
the underlying technological project that could take us
there. Leon Kass and the President's Council have given us a
good definition of technology: "a desire and disposition rationally
to understand, order, predict, and (ultimately) control the events
and workings of nature, all pursued for the sake of human
benefit."[8] While some Christians may
pause at control language, they pursue beneficence with the best of
humanity. But they also worry about pride and cultivate
humility.

[12] Technology is a dialectical space for
Christians. An adequate ethics should embody a hard-won wisdom
about changing the world and about coexistence--simply letting the
world be. In the Christian tradition, there is a creative and
vexing tension between living in conformity and consent to the
givenness of life and living critically and creatively in
anticipation of the transformative reign of God through
unconditional service to the needy neighbor. In an age of
ecological crisis rooted in an ethics of domination, people of good
will strive to discern the human place in a larger natural whole
and to limit agency in ways that give space to life beyond
them. In an age of emancipation rooted to the dignity of all
life, people of good will strive to acknowledge and to defer to the
autonomy of others. In addition to an ethics of
self-limitation and respect for the other, people of good will also
strive to address needs that others cannot fill for
themselves. In an age of unjust distribution of material and
social goods, people of good will see a world that can live better,
within the limits of time, contingency, and finitude.

[13] William Schweiker proposes a responsibility ethics
that captures the Christian tension.[9] With Jonas,
Schweiker contends that the moral problem today is the radical
extension of human power. The problem is more than our power
to destroy the planet. Equally serious is the moral confusion
that surrounds the exercise of power. Human power increasingly
becomes an end in itself, governed only by an ethics of
self-fulfillment. The case for responsibility faces daunting
challenges from the late-modern moral outlook. Responsible
exercise of power requires several things. Among them, it
demands the cultivation of moral integrity as an abiding commitment
to a center beyond the self, "the integrity of life." It
requires recognition of the goods of life (material, social,
reflective) and ability to enact integrated responses on behalf of
the "wholeness of life." While the goods of life are diverse,
humans also seek unity and coherence in what they do. They
want to be persons of integrity, dedicated to respecting and
enhancing life in its moral complexity and wholeness.

[14] For Schweiker, the imperative of responsibility is
this: "In all our actions and relations we are to respect and
enhance the integrity of life before God."[10] This is the sum of a
Christian life. Schweiker's understanding of respect and
enhancement addresses the tension between change and coexistence
noted above. Humans live first and foremost under an
imperative to respect-to recognize and show regard for others and
for one's self. As life makes a claim upon the self, it also
establishes constraints upon what can and should be
done. Subjects of respect cannot be treated as means to
others' ends. Subjects of respect are members of the same
moral community. The moral life involves recognizing and
showing regard for others and for the wider web of
life. Respect constitutes a moral baseline for all actions and
relations. But the imperative of responsibility in
Christianity calls for humans to enhance the community of life as
well-to make it better. Humans should work for the flourishing
of life in all of its complexity but not in ways that violate the
demand of respect. Respect governs enhancement. Respect
is a mode of reflexive limitation, a constraint against
"overhumanization."[11]

[15] Schweiker's imperative seeks to articulate biblical
commitments to justice, mercy, and humility before God. The
moral integrity that responsibility seeks is comparable to biblical
righteousness. But Schweiker's imperative could benefit from
middle axioms or subsidiary principles for the sake of moral
integration. Responsibility needs guidance about how we might
respect and enhance the integrity of life in all actions and
relations and how we might live with that
tension. Responsibility calls upon Christians to respect and
enhance multiple life goods with a view to the integrity of God's
world. This is love.

[16] As a summary norm for the Christian moral life,
Schweiker's imperative provides a fitting guide for reflection upon
biotechnology. However, the injunction to respect and enhance
the integrity of life can be understood in terms more dedicated to
this moral space. Four middle axioms or principles seem
relevant: participation, solidarity, sufficiency, and
sustainability. These principles constitute a pattern of
discernment in ELCA social statements. They are operative in
three social statements-those dealing with environment, peace, and
economic life.[12] They articulate a core
ethics of "faith active in love through justice" that guides six
statements of the 1990s. Participation, solidarity,
sufficiency, and sustainability are all principles of justice and
constitute an integral social ethic that enables persons to think
in coordinate and comprehensive ways about the many goods of life
and about different moral questions.

[17] These principles reinforce the sense of holism and
interdependence that a responsibility ethics demands. All
living things possess moral standing and rights; they are part of
the same moral community; and they have basic needs that should be
met without compromising the needs of future generations of
life. Participation means that community of moral deliberation
includes all of life. Solidarity entails care and
accountability for the interdependence of life. Sufficiency
and sustainability set limits and establish obligations for the
interactions of humans with all of life. Each principle makes
its own distinct claim, which both supports and stands in tension
with the other principles, so that multiple goods might be
respected and enhanced in their difference and wholeness.

[18] Our question is whether to commit or withhold serious
societal resources to age-retardation. In the end, moral
discernment delivers a rational yet probabilistic judgment of a
critical community of deliberation. The process is contextual and
fallible, but seeks truth (moral realism) that corresponds to God's
governance.[13] Given the contextual
and fallible character of moral judgment, we do well to have a
moral policy for novelty and uncertainty. For some thinkers,
we need the principle of precaution. Sustainability can also
be interpreted as a norm about risk of harm, and I employ this
meaning.[14] I turn now to
reflection on life-extension through the norms of participation,
solidarity, sufficiency and sustainability. I will stay close
to the articulation of these principles in the social statement on
the environment, where they were first used.

Participation

[19] For the ELCA, the principle of participation means
that humans are ensconced in a vast, interdependent, and created
community of life. The principle calls upon the church to be a
community of moral deliberation where all living things have a
voice-actual, imagined, present, future. The interests of the
entire community of life must be considered. The common good
shall be pursued.

[20] If humans have entered a "golden age" for
biotechnology positioning us on the "threshold" of radical
alterations of the human condition (a "post-human" society, as some
call it),[15] participation calls for a
great and urgent conversation. Creating the conditions for
such conversation is the first demand of
participation. Throughout the biological revolution of the
last fifty years, the slow and reactive character of societal
response to science and technology has been noted and
lamented. Legitimate and responsible social decisions about
radical life-extension or other biotechnology-based change remain
nowhere in sight. The task of moral formation for a
responsible humanity-as a universal initiative-is
daunting. World community of moral deliberation will be a long
time in coming-at best.

[21] While various forces work on building civil society
(the ELCA included), humans cannot delay debate and decision making
until we have robust institutions. We must go with an
imperfect process of communal conversation and social
decision-making about the common good. Given that the burden
of justification should rest with the agents of change, societies
like the United States must exercise global leadership by bringing
life-extension and similar questions into the public square of
democratically constituted political community.

[22] Francis Fukuyama makes the case for national and global
regulation of biotechnology-against the grain of much thinking
about biotechnology past and present.[16] While we
can bemoan the state of politics and wonder whether good public
policy can happen, there are no alternative
institutions. While we may be inclined to think that the rate
and immensity of biotechnological change cannot be governed by
states, the United States and the community of nations have acted
to regulate other consequential technologies-such as nuclear
power. Already, important forms of biotechnology are
regulated. Dozens of countries have banned reproductive
cloning. Dozens regulate GMOs. The world has adopted laws
for experimentation on humans. Embryo research is regulated in
many different states today.

[23] Universal regulation of biotechnology is both possible
and necessary. For Fukuyama, we will need to develop new
regulatory agencies, for several reasons. One important reason
is the growth of private investment in biotechnology, which does
not entail the social leverage created by public funding. Of
course, regulation will be contested and messy. The relatively
free and pluralistic research practices that created biotechnology
will now be subject to critical attention. Society will ban or
limit certain kinds of science and technology-and this will seem
fundamentally illiberal and even destructive in some
quarters. Yet, if we are serious about responsible, communal,
and participatory decisions about biotechnology, we cannot delay
conversation, and government regulation is the best public
mechanism we have for legitimacy and efficacy.

[24] Democratic governance depends upon civil society to
engender participatory polity. Participatory polity assumes
that a plurality of perspectives can be a political
good. Certain social actors, such as the churches, play an
important role in empowering the many. One voice seems
particularly crucial to social debate about life-extension, namely,
persons with disability. In a recently updated policy
statement, the National Council of Churches identifies the affects
that biotechnology can have for perceptions of disability as one of
four key challenges requiring attention. After noting the
promise of biotechnology, the statement adds that it can be
"profoundly disquieting to many with disabilities when disabling
conditions or predictions are equated with lifelong suffering,
imperfections, or disease."[17] Suffering,
imperfection, and disease are social constructs, which condition
moral discernment and which are conditioned by human
agency. Age-retardation technology would assume that
senescence unto death is a disorder or a disease to be
cured. Success would validate this assumption and encourage us
to imagine that the fundamental limit of life is now something of a
question, that should not and need not be.

[25] Since the technological imperative seeks to liberate
humans from limits and tends to alienate us from the limits we
face, avoidance and ignorance are commonplace.[18] Societies like the
United States can learn from persons who have deep awareness of
living with limits. As Deborah Creamer argues in the July,
2007 issue of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics,[19]
persons with disabilities live with the reality of limits as a
fluid and complex phenomenon. Disability might well be
understood as the embodiment of limits, and limits might be
understood as more normal than abnormal. As
biotechnology-empowered agency moves ever deeper into denial,
refusal, and resistance to limits, the lived experience of
disability provides a crucial wisdom for moral reflection. As
McKibben grapples with the prospect of genetic engineering, he is
mindful of his best childhood friend, Kathy, who had cystic
fibrosis. She died young but was the happiest and kindest
person he has ever known.[20] Most people know what
McKibben is talking about, yet cannot integrate this experience
into insight and judgment. At this historical moment,
participation needs voices intimate with limits.

Solidarity

[26] For the ELCA, solidarity has to do with affirmation of
God's interdependent creation and with cultivation of a relational
agency both local and global toward a harmony of interests and
responsibilities among individuals in community. It means
standing with the victims of natural disaster---and presumably
other assaults such as disease and disability. And it means
moral integrity and courage to stand with and for creation. If
participation seeks communication with others as subjects of
different perspective and wisdom, solidarity seeks community and
mutuality based upon a sense of kinship. Funded and
constrained by respect, solidarity involves enhancing life by
attending to life-giving collective action.

Solidarity speaks to the humanism that grounds and motivates the
work of biotechnology. It is about being mindful of and
helpful to others. Historically, the technological enterprise
has been dedicated to human benefit; solidarity rejects
anthropocentrism for a wider community (in Schweiker's language,
the integrity of life before God). But the generative,
other-regarding and even self-sacrificial element abides.

[27] It is unclear to me whether solidarity advances
discernment about age-retardation. I have one question without
an answer. Given that solidarity rejects anthropocentrism, is
there a problem with radical life-extension insofar as it seeks to
exempt the human from mortality, the way of all things living on
Earth? Arguably, there is a difference between the
life-extension of the present and what we might do. Twentieth
century gains have addressed premature death. They have
enabled people to live out a genetically conditioned, natural
lifespan. Biotechnology that would extend life-expectancy
beyond 115-120 years (the Hayflick limit[21]) is
different. It seeks to override the structures that make us
mortal. If we believe that death is not divine punishment for
sin but a necessary and universal structure of creation, can humans
as a species justify a break from this order? Would humans
violate solidarity by aiming to be exceptional? The question
is not whether such a project would undermine the interests and
needs of non-humankind. The question is whether we ought to
stand with the rest of creation in mortality.

Sufficiency

[28] A responsibility ethics is attentive to time and
consequence. Sufficiency guides the present; sustainability,
the future. For the ELCA, sufficiency means meeting the basic
needs of all humanity and all creation because life comes from God
for all. In a world of finite resources, sufficiency means
that some should share with the needy. In a world of modern
powers, enough for all is possible and normative.

[29] Sufficiency is a principle of distributive justice. It
calls for personal discrimination and social agreements about the
needs of humans and others. These needs include material,
social, and reflective goods. These goods are culturally
conditioned and variant. Americans 100 years ago would not
think of death before age 78 as "premature." They could not
judge whether heart valve or shoulder replacement at age 78 is
"medically-indicated." Is this need as morally weighty as
infant immunizations? Sufficiency requires grappling with such
questions within a universal context. Such cross-cultural
agreements about human need exist today and are part of the social
fabric of 21st century life in response to norms such as
sufficiency.

[30] In the thought of Seyla Benhabib, universal or global
ethics as cross-cultural dialogue has become a "pragmatic
imperative" in response to global interdependence.[22] In a context of
reciprocal exchange, influence, and interaction, humans share
issues of common concern, which become the subjects of inclusive
exchanges. For Benhabib, ethical universalism is a necessity
of life together; it is also a possibility because modern theories
of radical cultural incommensurability are mistaken insofar as they
are based upon problematic views of cultural
homogeneity. Because all cultures are polyvocal, fragmented,
and contested, the local and global are not qualitatively
different. Guided by norms of universal respect and
egalitarian reciprocity, humans can forge understanding and
cooperation.

[31] For Yersu Kim, another interactive universalist,
Benhabib's cross-cultural moral community appeared in the late
20th century, bearing promise for the challenges of the
21st. A host of cross-cultural discourses and
instruments have produced increasingly common norms to guide states
and peoples across an array of shared endeavors. The sense
that our emerging global society requires common principles has
recently prompted UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization) to undertake a universal ethics
project. This is but one example of a growing search for
universal norms, which Kim calls "transcendental-reflective"
inquiry and which asks what values and principles are needed to
orient technological and economic change to the human good-to human
need.[23]

[32] Subject to global discourse and discernment,
sufficiency bids us to act so that all people have access to a
decent minimum of health care, just as all people are entitled to a
safe and secure food supply or to public education. In a world
where so many needs for so many go unmet, resource allocation for
age-retardation technology that primarily benefits future
generations may need to give way to unmet needs today. Some
will argue that we can and should do both today. Humanity can
meet the UN Millennium Development Goals,[24] and Americans
can fund life-extension research through the National Institutes of
Health. In this case, the principle of sufficiency obliges
humans to share or create so that all people can eat, can read, can
vote, and more in our time. It helps us to discern deficiency
in the present and to enhance life within the governance of
need. Once the demands of sufficiency are met, life-extension
to benefit the future becomes morally optional, perhaps
commendable, but not obligatory.

[33] However, sufficiency can be a claim intended to create
a boundary that forbids further life-extension along a continuum of
change. McKibben's "Enough" is an extended argument for the
relative adequacy of modern human powers and natural resources to
meet the material and bodily needs of humans. Fair access
remains a problem. Social evil abounds. Depression
happens. But the "average daily life in the Western world"
(122) lacks little to nothing and more will be harmful for all
around. In other words, "enough" is a limit, not a baseline
requirement and goal of the good society. To counter the
temptation to go ruinously beyond enough, we need a "muted
celebration of the present." And we should ask around: "Can
you think of aspects of your daily material life that would be
dramatically improved by the next dose of technology?"[25] For people enveloped in
a technological world, sufficiency is normal and expected. "Bridges
do not fall down in Minnesota," such was the shocked citizen voice
I heard on my radio while vacationing in Canada when a bridge in
fact collapsed in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

[34] McKibben's argument is bold and rare. He says
"No" to further life-extension, germline genetic engineering (and
GMOs), cloning, robots for the masses, and therapeutic
nanotechnology. Why? Because humans simply do not need
them to be fulfilled and because these technologies could undermine
our humanity. The importance of arguments like McKibben's is
less the counter cultural conclusions and more the stimulation of
thick conversation about the good life and
society. Sufficiency is a relevant norm for discerning whether
we should significantly extend lifespan. I am intrigued by
McKibben's use of "enough" as a limit principle. Again, we
should note that it requires deliberation in detail about human
need. Theological and moral anthropology are our most urgent
topics of conversation.

Sustainability

[35] We must converse about human need to practice
sustainability as well. For the ELCA, the principle of
sustainability means providing an acceptable quality of life for
present generations without compromising that of future
generations. While the ELCA invokes Hebrew Sabbath and jubilee
laws as evidence of an ancient norm, the claim of sustainability
falls new on human life. It comes with a scope of
accountability that ancients could not imagine-population, power,
knowledge. These changes in the human condition warrant
revisions to traditional moral codes, such as the
Decalogue. Today, we are only beginning to consider what
sustainability means. But the concept has standing and support
in important texts such as the Earth Charter.[26]

[36] While we do not owe future generations radical
life-extension, sustainability obliges us to transmit an acceptable
quality of life. This norm requires sufficiency as a universal
reality both today and for an indefinite future. It requires
us to avoid collective, consequential practices that might put
sufficiency at risk. Thus, regarding radical life-extension,
we must imagine a future, say 100 years from now, when billions of
people are living for 200 years. (It is difficult to say how
many because such an increase in lifespan will affect fertility and
survival rates.) And we must imagine how this change would
figure in a summary judgment about an "acceptable quality of
life." One may object that radical life-extension technology
would never be universally available and used. This is
probably true. However, responsibility requires us to test
this possibility.

[37] That said, imagining whether a world of long delayed
senescence and death would be "acceptable" to these humans can seem
mistaken and impossible. These people will be very different
in experience and outlook. Consider the variables that we
cannot foresee and all that we can foresee. How can we begin
to assess the quality of this existence? It is tempting to
withhold speculation and simply conclude that these people will
adapt and flourish, as human populations have adapted and
flourished countless times before. But this is to renounce any
accountability for the future. With respect to the physical
and natural world today, a sense of obligation is real and
growing. Humans en masse are beginning to evaluate our
production of greenhouse gases with a view to
sustainability. Here we do not blanch at the task of
imagination and evaluation. Responsibility toward the human
world is difficult, but we must have that conversation as well.

[38] Radical life-extension through age-retardation could
involve different forms of senescence. Do we seek a life where
aging and death come on rapidly or will we choose to be old for a
long period? Such questions will be tied up with whether we
come to think of life as a cycle of different interacting stages or
as a succession of the same-the same being mostly decades of
relatively vigorous maturity. So, would we have a world that
functions without the aged? Today, the young define themselves
in relation to the old and vice versa. Callahan has argued
that the aged have a crucial social role to teach the young about
time, identity, and meaning.[27] Will the
young be lost if senescence happens in years, not
decades? Will the sense that we have lots of time make our 20s
and 30s less stressful? For we will have lots of time to find
ourselves and our social niche-living at home with our
parents. Happily, personal, social, and biological clocks may
not compete for attention as they can today. Perhaps the fear
of death will also decrease. Or perhaps this anxiety will
increase, the end more brutal than now. With 200 years before
us, how will we see social engagement and commitment? Will we
find more time for personal development? Will we feel less
ground up by the world, less defined by its needs and
demands? Will we enjoy living together with partners, parents,
offspring, and friends for vaster periods? What about those
undying enemies-will we forgive and move on? The cycle of
generational succession will be less compressed. People will
carry more life experience, and society will be enriched. But
with less rapidity of succession, will there be less creativity in
the world? Or is that ageist thinking? These are
questions of human sustainability.

[39] So, a planet where billions lived 200 years would be a
different world. But would it be better, worse,
acceptable? Thinkers who have studied the matter suggest that
we can discern the questions. We can see possible benefits and
losses. But how do we get a handle on the issue of
"acceptable" quality of life? For now, we can arguably
withhold approval of radical life-extension for reasons of cost,
fair access, and safety. There are urgent and present human
needs that claim our attention. We are not ready to take our
own evolution in hand.

[40] But suppose that these objections can be met, what
then? We are back to the question of the good life and of
human need. Perhaps there is a hard truth that creation has an
integrity or wholeness and that human well being (the good life,
happiness, righteousness, shalom) is inseparable from bodies that
age through time and that die as part of a life cycle of
generational succession-and that 200 years on earth might be
destructive of human needs. As lives of 78 years are better
than 48, perhaps 200 would be a boon to creation.

Concluding Judgment

[41] For the sake of conservation, allow me to end with a
personal moral leaning-not quite tipped. Compromise is about
exposure to risk. Siding with risk avoidance in the face of
novelty and consequence (precaution) and refusing to go further
down the road of age-retardation is a responsible stance-provided
that a credible case for sufficiency can be made. Given that
we owe ourselves and the future sufficiency, we need to establish
that the modern norm of 78 years is enough unto human need. I
am inclined to agree with the reasoning of the President's Council
on this point:

[42] The past century's advances in average lifespan, now
approaching eighty years for the majority of our fellow citizens,
have come about through largely intelligible operations within a
natural world shaped by human understanding and human
powers. It is a conceptually manageable lifespan, with
individuals living not only through childhood and parenthood but
long enough to see their own grandchildren, and permitted a taste
of each sort of relationship. It is a world in which one's
direct family lineage is connected by both genetics and personal
experience, not so attenuated by time that relatives feel
unrelated. Generation and nurture, dependency and reciprocated
generosity, are in some harmony of proportion, and there is a pace
of journey, a coordinated coherence of meter and rhyme within the
repeating cycles of birth, ascendancy, and decline---a balance and
beauty of love and renewal giving answer to death that, however
poignant, bespeaks the possibility of meaning and goodness in the
human experience. All of this might be overthrown or forgotten
in the rush to fashion a technological project only along the
gradient of our open-ended desire and ambitions.[28]

[43] McKibben speaks of a "muted celebration the human
present" as a counter-balance to the refusal and resistance that
drives technology. The human present that we celebrate has
been richly enhanced by technology. But not everything that we
can do is good. In the case of radical life-extension, we can
see gain, and we can see risk. For many, the "might" of the
President's Council is too cautious, a failure of
nerve. Indeed, to take such a stand, we must be convinced of
the sufficiency of the present; then we might set limits to the
technological imperative.

Per Anderson, "Agriculture, Food, and Responsible Biotechnology"
in Karen L. Bloomquist, ed., Lutheran Ethics at the Intersections
of God's One World (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 2006),
169-92. A revised and expanded version of this essay,
"Transgenic Agriculture and Christian Responsibility: A Framework
for Global Ethics," was presented at the 2006 meeting of the
Society of Christian Ethics in Phoenix, AZ, and is available upon
request to the author (anderson@cord.edu)

"Caring for Creation: Vision, Hope, and Justice," Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America, adopted at the Churchwide Assembly,
August 23, 1993; "For Peace in God's World," Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America, adopted at the Churchwide Assembly, August 20,
1995; "Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All," Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America, adopted at the Churchwide Assembly,
August 20, 1999.

In a previous work where I have explored the adequacy of ELCA
thought for guiding reflection about genetically modified crops and
foods, I saw a need to add a fifth axiom: precaution. I am
uncertain whether the best definition of precaution (UNESCO)
applies to life-extension and am inclined to think that
participation, solidarity, sufficiency and sustainability are
adequate. The question is whether these axioms capture the
moral density of life-extension and enable us to see the full range
of things that should be considered in moral discernment. To quote
UNESCO, "The [precautionary principle] applies to a special class
of problems that is characterized by: (1) complexity in the natural
and social systems that govern the causal relationships between
human activities and their consequences and (2) unquantifiable
scientific uncertainty in the characterization and assessment of
hazards and risks. The existing decision-support tools to cope
with risks in a rational way, such as probabilistic risk assessment
and cost-benefit analysis, have limited value under these
conditions." See United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization [UNESCO], World Commission on the Ethics of
Scientific Knowledge and Technology, The Precautionary Principle,
(Paris, March 2005), 16.

Yersu Kim, "Philosophy and the Prospects for a Universal Ethics"
in Max Stackhouse and Peter Paris, eds., Religion and the Powers of
the Common Life, God and Globalization, Vol. 1, (Harrisburg, PA:
Trinity Press International, 2000), 95.

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